Construction of productivity windows for fillet welds using the FCAW process for thin ship panel manufacturing

The FCAW process used filler metal E71T-11 of Ø0.035” to apply fillet welds with a size of ~4mm on T-joints made of ASTM A36 steel, in a horizontal position, using 42 appropriate combinations of wire feed speeds -WFS- (between 50 and 540 ipm), voltages (13-33V) and welding speeds (4.2-24.5 ipm). The test welds applied with each combination were inspected visually and by macro-attack to establish their compliance with the acceptance criteria for naval panels provided by the American Bureau of Shipping - ABS. With these results, Voltage vs. WFS, Voltage vs. Amperage and Heat Input vs. WFS graphs were constructed, and productivity windows were drawn over them including the combinations of welding parameters capable of producing welds of acceptable quality. The productivity windows obtained with this method, called ARCWISE, allow proper welding parameters to be selected during the design of WPSs avoiding iterative processes of trial and error.